During March we ventured down to Brighton to set up a shoot at the Royal Pavilion Gardens. The task was to show the Cambo range of cameras that are being used for landscape and architectural photography.

For many years Cambo have manufactured high quality camera systems and one of the leading products that we demonstrated was the Wide RS together with a Schneider 43XL TS lens and Leaf Credo 60 digital back.

The Wide RS version shown here is the 1250; the same as the 1200 but with hand carved ergonomic wooden handgrips. The 1200 series has a total shift of 40mm, rise of 25mm and fall of 15mm, again 40mm in total.

The Schneider 43XL TS lens is unique to Cambo. The lens is set in a helical focus mount and then the Wide RS camera mount fitted. Cambo over many years have engineered a unique TS system which is also fitted to the lens. The TS is the “Tilt Swing” enabling you to optimise sharpness, keep sharpness along the plane to the vanishing point or create unsharpness along the plane. This is adjustable +5 / -5 degrees tilt and +5 / -5 degrees swing in both directions.

Capture Process We composed the image and checked the focus so that we would have the face of the gateway in focus down to the base of the trees, the foreground would remain out of focus for this image. Focus was made on the gateway and a small amount of tilt used to achieve the result. We captured at 1/125th and set the aperture at f11 as this is the best to obtain the ultimate quality from this lens. As you can see the mid morning sunlight is hitting the face of the gateway and there is quite deep shadows under the trees. I wanted to enhance the gateway and also lift the shadows. To do this I adjusted the High Dynamic range in the RAW file. As you can see Capture One handles this information incredibly well and shows plenty of detail in the stone work and copper roof.

Gateway Before

Gateway Detail After

Additional sharpness is always required to the RAW file, I added the following; Amount 140, Radius 1.0 and Threshold 2.0. As you can see the final detail is excellent, and the overall result and sharpness is exactly what was required.

Gateway – Final Detail

George IV Gateway – Final Image

The shoot would not be complete without showing the lens swing function. Turning to the Royal Pavilion building I focused on the front of the building and by using the lens swing pulled the windows at the far point into focus. Again this enabled me to use f11, the best aperture for this lens.

Royal Pavilion 1

Pavilion – Left

Pavilion – Centre

Pavilion – Right

Pavilion Building – Final Image

As we are showing the use of tilt and swing the colour has not been totally corrected. The light was quite harsh at this time of day and the green from the grass certainly kicks into the building colour. This can be corrected in post production, which I will do when we blog about colour workflow at a later date. Thankfully by using the Cambo flexible lenshade, there is no glare or lens flare and the end result is nice and crisp.

Focussing You may be asking “how do you focus the image when using a technical camera with a digital back?” For this exercise I chose the Leaf Credo 60 which has the functionality of live view but you need to use an ND filter to view this on the screen. In this case my preference was to use the Cambo flexible focus hood and ground glass. Simply focus on the subject and use the tilt or swing depending on the subject to bring in the focus plane. Check the focus points 3 times and you will get sharp results.

Please bear in mind we are using screen captures or images downsized to the blog dimensions. The quality of the RAW files are extremely high and very large files sizes. If you wish to see the Wide RS in action then send us an email and we’ll discuss your requirements.

Next Blog… Cambo ACTUS-DB Shoot, Brighton results… sign up to get the latest information first…go to the top of this page and click Sign Me Up!

Thanks for reading!

For more information about purchasing the Cambo Wide RS System please contact us at Cambo UK email: cambouk@gmail.com Tel: +44 (0)7863 116150

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About Cambo

Marketing manager and content writer based in the UK. Business site http://www.actionmc.co.uk - specialising in blogging and promoting sales of high quality professional photographic and video equipment.